By Monica Vaughan, Center for Health Journalism, July 2020
Sitting in a living room in a neighborhood with the worst air quality in this region of the California Central Coast, a woman told me her adult daughter had a constant cough since moving back home.
She said she couldn’t keep the house clean, everything was always covered in dust inside and out. She had read my stories about the dust from the dunes in the local newspaper, The Tribune, and I asked if she thought her daughter’s persistent cough might have something to do with dust that blows in on windy days.
She hadn’t considered that. “When I read news about the dunes, I scan the story looking for the sentence that says whether it is dangerous to live here, and I never find it,” she told me.
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